Create a Dynamic Onboarding Experience (The First Day of Practice)

Set your athletes (and their families) up for success with a great and effective onboarding experience. Onboarding is an HR term referring to the process of introducing a newly hired employee into the organization (BambooHR).

In sports, onboarding would be the first practice of a new season or when you have a new team member joining the team. Onboarding can set the tone for a new athlete's experience and can impact how well they perform and how long they decide to stay. Harvard reports that a quality onboarding experience creates 54% greater new hire productivity (Kierstead).

How does this affect how we coach and run our teams? If we create a positive experience when new athletes join or when the new season starts, we can set our athletes up for success and for a great experience.

Use the onboarding process to clearly define roles, responsibilities, and expectations for your athletes and their families. Clearly define team goals and individual expectations. Help your athletes and their families understand what the team prioritizes and emphasizes early and often so that everybody is on the same page.

Create a welcoming and inviting environment where teammates feel comfortable and not judged so that they are free to learn, grow, and ask questions. Mistakes are a part of the learning and growing process, so creating an environment where athletes feel like they belong, valued, and safe will help set them up for better performance and a better experience.

Tell and teach new teammates what they can expect from you and the team. If you start or end practice a certain way or do certain things differently, let them know. My teams start and end every practice by Circling Up and talking about our day (outside of sports) and setting expectations for the practice or reflecting on the practice. We do so to build relationships, and we expect everybody to share. We talk to new teammates about this because they might not be used to doing this on other teams and sharing information about life at basketball might be shocking to a new teammate.

When you have a new teammate or need to set or reset expectations to start a new season or in the middle of a season, have regular conversations that define the team's values, shared mission, and goals to provide clarity and direction. Cover every topic from what to wear in practice and games, to what time to show up, to what pre-practice and post-practice shoot around looks like, to how to talk to and encourage each other, to how to overcome mistakes and adversity, to where the bathrooms and water fountains are, and everything in between. 

Share the cultural values of your team and show how your team is committed to being inclusive and having an inclusive environment. This is an opportunity to set the norms and expectations of how everybody treats each other on the team.

It is also important to acknowledge when your athletes have outgrown their roles on the team and are ready for new levels of responsibility. While we want to provide our athletes with an environment that will keep them happy, hopeful, engaged, and motivated, don't hold your athletes back, even if expanding their role on the team is not an option. If you have an athlete that needs to move on because they have found a better opportunity, support them in that effort. The best teams have teams where people can step up and step in to fulfill the roles of their teammates. This requires coaches to be clear on what they expect and to be teachers and developers who grow the skills, judgment, and confidence of all of their athletes.

References

Kierstead, Jana. "Create a Dynamic Onboarding Experience." Promising Practices for Employee Engagement, 2020, pp. 7-9.

“What Is Onboarding in HR?” BambooHR, www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/onboarding/.